A variety of wireless communication products are developed along with the evolution of wireless communication technology. One of the invention of the wireless communication technology is to support faster transmission rate and better transmission quality. The long term evolution (LTE) technology has been extensively used in various communication products. The development of the next generation wireless communication system, that is, the 5th generation wireless system, has been started and in progress.
Quality of service (QoS) is important to the communication technology. QoS control is a mechanism to prioritize user equipment or data flows or to perform different data flow treatments to achieve the required performance according to the requirements of applications. Network resource management is one of the critical technology to achieve the required QoS, especially for delay sensitivity data flows of the applications such as multimedia streaming or disaster prevention and reaction.
A service data flow (SDF) of the Evolved Packet System (EPS) is transmitted between a user equipment (UE) and a peer entity via a radio access network access node (RAN access node), and the QoS features of the bearer between the peer entity and the core network, between the core network and the RAN access node, and between the RAN access node and the UE possess a one-to-one correspondence relationship. In the 5th generation wireless communication system, a service data flow (SDF) is transmitted to the RAN access node via a QoS flow, and is further transmitted to the user equipment by the RAN access node via a data radio bearer. However, the QoS flow and the data radio bearer is not limited to a one-to-one corresponding relationship. The RAN access node could transmit the data flows of multiple QoS flows having different QoS features via the same data radio bearer that imposes the same QoS features in the radio access network to the QoS flows or could establishment a new data radio bearer for a QoS flow with the QoS feature required by the QoS flow. Therefore, the RAN access node needs the QoS features of the QoS flows as well as the features of the data flows of the QoS flows e.g., to differentiate the treatment such as scheduling of the user plane packets of the data flows to achieve the QoS requirement of the QoS flows and the data flows, such that the QoS of the SDF transmitted between the peer entity and the user equipment can be maintained. Here below, the data flow features corresponding to the user plane packets are referred as “service type”, and the differentiation of service types is referred as “service level traffic differentiation”.